Building the future with big data

Australia's Global University: advancing the way we live by harnessing the potential of big data.

Big Data

The Era of Big Data

We live in a time when there has never been so much data and the amount of data we are generating is increasing at an exponential rate.

The data produced by the billions of connected devices and trillions of interactions that take place on a daily basis, will soon be dwarfed. The deployment of smart sensors is allowing us to track this magnitude of data at the same rate as the Internet of Things continues to grow.

This development has seen our ability to analyse and draw insights from this data to dramatically improve. Increased processing power and data storage capabilities, as well as the emergence of powerful and accessible tools for analysing large data sets, means that it is now possible for researchers, organisations and governments to take the data they and others are generating, and use it to better understand our world.

Rather than being limited to working with samples, or partial data, we live in an era where we can analyse massive amounts of data and do so in real time. This is the era of big data.

Big data offers the promise of better insights into the world around us and the communities we serve. For businesses, it will help them better understand and serve their customers. For governments, it promises a powerful new way to understand how policies can be better designed to achieve their objectives.

Big data promises the opportunity for us to not only test whether what we have done in the past has worked but to more accurately predict what will work in the future.

Professor Nick Wailes

Associate Dean (Digital and Innovation)

UNSW Business School | UNSW

But if this promise is to be realised we have lots of work to do. At UNSW, big data research is pushing the boundaries of these new technologies and analytic tools. Our researchers are at the leading edge of understanding how big data can be used to improve people’s lives, creating economic benefit and developing new techniques to take advantage of the flood of data that we can expect in the future.

Big Data at UNSW

At UNSW there are a plethora of opportunities that allow students to learn from and collaborate with some of Australia's leading academics in the realm of big data. Discover the courses and research networks that exist across UNSW that revolve around the research, analysis and application of big data: